Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  His next big project took him back to a long-standing challenge in the field of electricity—developing a better storage battery. As with the light bulb, the ever optimistic Edison had thoroughly underestimated the technical difficulties. He began work in earnest in 1900 and introduced the battery in 1903 with his usual fanfare and hyperbole, asserting: “I am sure one [battery] will last longer than four or five automobiles.”27 Unfortunately, the battery had two fatal flaws—it began to leak, and it did not recharge as needed. Edison yanked it from the market and soldiered on. He had poured $1.5 million of his own into the effort when at last in 1909 he delivered a new kind of nickel-iron-alkaline battery that proved to have many uses. Initially its greatest market was in electric vehicles, and before the gas engine triumphed, half of American delivery trucks used the Edison battery. When that market disappeared, Edison hustled up many other industrial uses. The Edison Storage Battery Company slowly recouped the huge investment. As Edison once said, “I always invent to obtain money to go on inventing.”

  Edison reveled in presiding over his numerous companies and remained understandably leery now about ceding any control to outsiders. In 1912, the aging inventor explained to Henry Ford in a letter, “Up to the present time I have only increased the [battery] plant with profits made in other things, and this has a limit. Of course I could go to Wall Street and get more, but my experience over there is as sad as Chopin’s ‘Funeral March.’ I keep away.”28 By having few stockholders besides himself, Edison never had to worry that the money men would sell him down the river again, nor did he have to listen to their carping. But it also limited him at times because he did not have big capital. His legendary stubbornness served him well and ill. It certainly helped him push on toward success when anyone else would have despaired and quit. But it also still prevented him from recognizing important new technologies that he did not invent. Just as he had refused to see the importance of AC in the 1880s, in the 1920s he denigrated commercial radio. Edison hated the idea that the radio audience was obliged to hear other people’s choices of music and amusement. But the (free) delights of radio soon caused phonograph sales to stall and decline—and Edison would not let his company (now ostensibly run by his sons) design and sell radios until it was too late to compete.

  As Edison headed into the final decades of a long and highly productive career as inventor and entrepreneur, he found himself the most admired man in America, a genuine national hero whose huge accomplishments were made all the more endearing by his folksy persona. The press still loved him, and he rarely disappointed, regaling reporters with forthright and humorous remarks. Who but Edison, after a huge and devastating fire at his West Orange laboratory in 1914, could say, “Oh shucks, it’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of old rubbish.”29 His birthday became the occasion of annual admiring articles. Edison spent more and more time enjoying the tropical pleasures of his waterfront home, Seminole Lodge, in the Florida Everglades. There, underwritten by his late-life friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, the aging Edison passed his four final years happily pursuing the holy grail of finding a wartime source of American rubber for industrial purposes.

  The public viewed Edison as the lovable man who had brought them many wonderful things that profoundly changed their world—certainly the phonograph was an astonishing addition to daily life, while movies had become a national passion. Honors and medals in profusion were his. Edison was as devoted as any workaholic could be to his younger second wife. His six children by his two marriages saw little of him as they grew up and found him a disappointing father. Some were estranged. Two sons ran his companies. In the end, the companies, which he owned, were worth about $12 million, a fraction of the value of Westinghouse’s industrial corporations.

  To this day, Thomas Edison remains the American inventor with the most patents: 1,093. His Menlo Park workshop served as the early prototype of the highly productive industrial laboratory. Above all, Edison in the 1920s was seen as the patron saint of the invisible energy that made life so much easier, so much better for so many—electric light. And though he had long been removed from the electric power industry, Edison’s name was still attached to many local lighting companies and he was happy to bask in that role. When he died in 1931 at age eighty-four, The New York Times lauded the inventor whose “genius so magically transformed the everyday world…. No one in the long roll of those who have benefitted humanity has done more to make existence easy and comfortable.”30

  NIKOLA TESLA

  Nikola Tesla outlived both his original champion, George Westinghouse, and his early rival, Edison. After the triumph of the Niagara Falls Power Company plant, Tesla concentrated his electrical research and experimentation on producing extremely high voltages and frequencies, all with the ultimate aim of wireless transmission of energy, for either communication or power. His dreams were big, far beyond the imaginings of his peers, and very expensive. By the end of 1897 he was already having money troubles, as he confided in an importuning letter to Ernest Heinrichs. The Westinghouse PR man wrote back, “While I am very glad to hear that you are physically and mentally in perfect condition, it grieves me very much to have you inform me that you are ailing with what you choose to call ‘financial anemia.’ … I shall remember your wish about speaking of you to the boys in Pittsburgh and trust that some of them will feel disposed to send you a christmas rememberance [sic].”31

  Tesla’s idealistic and generous renunciation of his AC royalties was beginning to haunt him. With both Westinghouse and GE now sharing the Tesla patents and building induction motors, this income would have easily supported his most profligate laboratory research and still left him the very rich man he deserved to be. His first biographer and longtime friend, John J. O’Neill, estimated that by 1905, when Tesla’s AC motor patent expired, American induction motors alone were generating 7 million horsepower. At $2.50 per horsepower, one can quickly calculate that Tesla had nobly forfeited a princely and heartbreaking $17.5 million in royalties.32 Why didn’t George Westinghouse, now that his company was prospering, reward Tesla in some way for this sacrifice? We simply do not know. The investments of men like Edward Dean Adams, who had bankrolled Tesla to a certain point, were small change compared to this lost royalty income.

  Fortunately, Tesla’s post-Niagara status as an electrical genius extraordinaire was sufficient to persuade several of his rich New York society friends and admirers to ante up tens of thousands to perfect his latest amazing invention. By early May 1898, with America’s newly declared war with Spain reaching fever pitch, Tesla was anxious to display his new work before a select audience of invited guests—wealthy potential investors—during an electrical exposition at the vast Moorish-style Madison Square Garden. One always expected something unusual, dazzling, and uncanny at a Tesla lecture, strange gadgets and electrical gizmos capable of throwing out great bolts of light and lightning, but the top-hatted millionaires who walked into the private auditorium this time found only a very large tank of water and what looked like every boy’s dream, a gigantic toy boat five feet long by three feet wide. Nikola Tesla explained that they were looking at his perfected remote-controlled robotic boat, what he called his “teleautomaton.” He used a handheld transmitter to direct his boat to sail forward, change directions, and turn its lights on and off. While cementing his reputation as a weird and wonderful wizard, this display thoroughly obscured the two major scientific advances—a multichannel broadcasting system and remote-control electronics—embodied in this seemingly oversize toy. Tesla declared, “You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”33 The millionaires were not at all convinced and left unwilling to open their checkbooks.

  With little commercial interest in his automatons, Tesla returned to his previous love—the infinite generation of wireless electrical power and transmission. Of course, this would also take large sums of money to move forward. He targeted his close acquaintance the fabul
ously wealthy John Jacob Astor IV, exhorting him to become a backer of his manifold grandiose electrical dreams. “You will see how many enterprises can be built up on that novel principle, Colonel. It is for a reason that I am often and viciously attacked, because my inventions threaten a number of established industries.” Astor brought Tesla smartly back to earth, writing, “Let us stick to oscillators and cold lights. Let me see some success in the marketplace with these two enterprises, before you go off saving the world with an invention of an entirely different order, and then I will commit more than my good wishes.” Receiving even that nibble, Tesla maintained a persistent pursuit, tantalizing Astor by describing how “I can run on a wire sufficient for one incandescent lamp more than 1000 of my own lamps, giving fully 5000 times as much light. Let me ask you, Colonel, how much is this alone worth when you consider that there are hundreds of millions invested today in electric lights?”34 By late 1898, Astor capitulated and bought $30,000 worth of stock in Tesla’s company.

  Living in his new patron’s famous hotel seemed to be part of this deal, and Nikola Tesla left behind the upper-middle-class comforts of the Gerlach Hotel for the prodigal opulence and society cachet of the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria, an eleven-story German-Renaissance palace at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. With its numerous elegant public rooms, the Waldorf-Astoria by the last turn of the century was the fashionable watering hole for the New York elite, as well as the preferred hostelry for visiting royalty. Whether it was gala balls or intimate tête-à-têtes where one could watch swells and society ladies passing through Peacock Alley, the Waldorf-Astoria radiated luxury, privilege, and ostentation. Nikola Tesla settled in happily.

  Despite Tesla’s practical talk of his new and better light bulb sweeping the world, as soon as he had Colonel Astor’s money safely in hand, the elegant inventor immediately set aside such prosaic concerns to return to the electrical frontier he so loved to explore. As he built bigger and more powerful oscillators and generators that threw out ever greater streamers of electricity, Tesla realized he could not safely continue in his Houston Street laboratory. Leonard Curtis, a friend and patent attorney, had retreated from the stress and strain of New York legal life to the frontier simplicities of Colorado Springs, a pretty resort at the foot of the pristine Rocky Mountains. There he ran the electric power company, a now essential part of the local mining industry. He offered Tesla free land for a makeshift laboratory outside of town with a majestic view of Pike’s Peak, and free electricity. Tesla began sending ahead his electrical equipment—copper bars, great rolls of electrical wire, huge generators and motors, while he himself followed that spring.

  When the tall, slender Tesla stepped off the train into the dry, cool air of Colorado Springs on May 19, 1899, he was as far west as he had ever been. Before him rose the Rocky Mountains in all their snow-capped violet glory, while the crisp blue sky at this high altitude seemed to go on forever. The lovely town, set among such magnificent scenery and ringed by meadows of wildflowers, was also famous for its healthful mineral springs. Tesla’s old friend Curtis and the town’s leading dignitaries hospitably welcomed the New York wizard, delighted to have such an eminent personage grace their small community. They escorted him to the Alta Vista Hotel and then formally feted him at a great banquet. Nikola Tesla stayed in room 207 (divisible by three) at the Alta Vista, his window looking out on the mountains, and had eighteen fresh towels delivered each morning. Tesla told the local reporters he planned “to send a message from Pike’s Peak to Paris [for the Paris Exposition]…. I will investigate electrical disturbances in the earth. There are great laws, which I want to discover, and principles to command.”35

  While Colonel Astor, off on a European tour, no doubt assumed Tesla was attending to the practical details of conquering the world with his “cold” light, the great inventor was instead contemplating far more exalted concerns as he began to construct his Colorado Springs laboratory at six thousand feet above sea level. The first concern was how to design and build the most powerful electrical transmitter ever. Then once that was up and running, Tesla was seeking to individualize and isolate the energy that his supertransmitter sent forth into the atmosphere. Finally, he wanted to determine whether the earth and its atmosphere were—as he suspected—resonating at specific frequencies. How did such energy waves travel?

  To answer these questions, Tesla had constructed, far beyond the edge of town on a prairie pasture, a huge wooden barnlike structure with a retractable roof, braced on three sides with wooden supports. Jutting up was a wooden tower holding a single two-hundred-foot-tall copper pole topped with a yard-wide copper ball. The copper pole rose from the largest Tesla coil yet, which the inventor referred to as his “magnifying transformer,” capable of generating 100 million volts. The inside of the barnlike structure appeared to be some kind of riding ring, a wide circular space hemmed in on all sides by a tall wooden fence. The plain plank floor was filled with electrical equipment that turned out to be Tesla’s transmitter, built to operate on the local AC from the Colorado Springs power station. It was then sent through a transformer to hugely increase voltage. Outside the wooden arena sat Tesla’s receiving stations, which to the untrained eye mainly looked like gigantic cans. Tesla had one assistant he had brought from New York, a young man sworn to deepest secrecy. To keep away the inevitable electrical sightseers, Tesla put up a tall fence and posted many signs warning “Keep Out, Great Danger.” One reporter who ventured into the compound to peer through the windows found Tesla’s assistant next to him saying, “Your life is in peril and you would be a great deal safer if you would remove yourself from the vicinity.”36

  To Nikola Tesla’s delight, Colorado Springs had frequent, gigantic, crashing thunderstorms. On July 3, 1899, Tesla was working on getting his laboratory installed when he noticed dark clouds massing in the west, boiling up until they erupted into a violent electrical storm that passed over the plain and receded far into the distance. It was then “I obtained the first decisive experimental evidence of a truth of overwhelming importance for the advancement of humanity,” he would later write. On his instruments Tesla saw recorded “heavy and long persistent [electrical] arcs” as the storm passed and then became fainter and fainter. The storm came and went, but the equipment continued to record electrical activity waxing and waning at a regular rate. These were standing electrical waves. “No doubt whatever remained: I was observing stationary waves…. The tremendous significance of this fact in the transmission of energy by my system had already become quite clear to me. Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic messages to any distance without wires, as I recognized long ago, but also to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts to any terrestrial distance and almost without loss.”37 Tesla now firmly believed energy could be transmitted without wires.

  He continued to construct his powerful magnifying transformer, and finally the evening came when he was ready to test it. As the darkness settled its cool velvet mantle over the Rockies, Tesla stationed himself where he could watch the copper pole. Dressed for the occasion in his best cutaway, derby hat, and thick rubber-soled shoes, he signaled his helper inside to turn on the switch. He saw a ten-foot blue spark spurt from the copper ball, then another, and another, each longer, bluer, until they crackled forth in huge bolts forty, fifty, sixty feet long, then a hundred feet, each setting off a great crack of thunder. Inside the barn laboratory, the whole atmosphere was alive with a blue aura and dancing sparks. Joyously, Tesla looked back up at the copper ball—lightning 130 feet long was spurting out, a brilliant flash that brought on a gigantic crash of thunder. Then all went dead and the smell of ozone was overpowering. It became so quiet, the wind could be heard rustling through the mountain grasses. Tesla rushed in to scold his assistant, but all their power was gone. When they looked over at Colorado Springs, it, too, was dark. Tesla had blown out the town’s powerhouse.

  All summer, fall, and
winter, Tesla happily explored this unmapped terrain of high voltages, the earth’s resonance, and electrical waves. He had spectacular photographs taken showing him sitting in the laboratory reading while great bolts of lightning played about him. These were, in fact, double exposures, but when published subsequently, they only reinforced his reputation as an incredible electrical wizard, a man capable of making lightning to rival the angry gods. Finally, in late January of 1900, Tesla had to pull himself away from these fascinating experiments and return to New York.

  When Nikola Tesla debarked in effulgent glory at Gotham, he found the pulsating city in a greater frenzy of moneymaking than ever. At long, long last, the American economy had recovered from the searing depression of the 1890s. Manhattan’s streets were still jammed with horse-drawn vehicles, but now they sparred for space with the electric trolleys and the new plaything of the wealthy, the motorcar. Tesla settled happily back into the opulence of the Waldorf-Astoria, enjoying his own celebrity as he strolled through Peacock Alley, resplendent in his beautifully tailored Prince Albert coat, four-in-hand tie, white silk shirt, favorite green suede high-top boots, silver-topped cane, kidskin gloves, and those famously flashing eyes. Nikola Tesla reclaimed his place in New York society’s whirl of lavish dinners, opera soirees, and dinners at Delmonico’s or Sherry’s, always keeping an eye out for possible wealthy investors. His laboratory in Colorado Springs had been an exhilarating, expensive foray, and once again his coffers were empty. Moreover, he had no major commercial venture for generating new and future income. Of course, he approached Colonel Astor again, only to find him now politely indifferent to the man who had put aside “cold” light to pursue electrical chimeras.